GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
08 JUNE 2026. CHINA POST #624
CHINA – DR JI CHAODING – JACK PERRY
- THE CONTEXT
GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON exists to promote information about China in the belief that China will increasingly play a prominent role in international affairs. This is about China Today and China Tomorrow and its impact upon the rest of the world in 2026 and 2076.
But how did it begin? How did China venture into the world arena after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949? How did links between the new China and the United Kingdom facilitate the beginning of the burgeoning relationship between the two countries.
The narrative lends itself tidily into two parts – first, about China and the World, and, second, about a Dr Ji Chaoding of China and a Mr Jack Perry of the UK.
At one level it is the geopolitical story of the 21st Century – the coming of China has enormous consequences for the rest of the world. At another level it is the personal story of a friendship between a Chinese academic from Shaanxi Province in China and a Jewish businessman from the East End of London in the UK. A friendship that triggered a long-term relationship between China and the UK.
- THE WORLD SITUATION
The starting point is China and the struggle from 1927 to 1949 between the Communist Party of China (CPC) led by Mao Tsetung and the Kuomintang Party (KMT) led by Chiang Kaishek. It embraces the Long March of 1933-35 to Ya’nan prior to the temporary alliance of the CCP and the KMT brought about in order to expel Japan from China during World War II culminating in the third and final Revolutionary War (1945-1949) between the CCP and the KMT and the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
The CPC is triumphant. It has recorded a significant victory for the newly developing Socialist path of development. What had commenced in 1848 with the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels and continued with the Russian Revolution of 1917 had now reached a new stage of historical significance. But a big challenge lay ahead. What path was China to choose to recover from the brutality of World War II and the Civil War with the KMT? And what initiatives would be required to bring the new China into the changing post -World War II era? Who were its Friends and who were its Enemies?
- THE CHALLENGE FACING CHINA
China faced big challenges and its leadership felt the responsibility of history on its shoulders. If it failed, then Socialism. too, would fail and the Marxist experiment would be consigned to history. But if it succeeded, it would offer the vast under-developed Third World a new concept of progress and development.
The stakes were high and the first steps of the new Party leadership needed to turn its attention away from the guerilla warfare that had brought it victory over the Japanese in the Patriotic War and the KMT in the Civil War and towards the development of the new Marxist state. New ideas; new priorities; new politics and new relationships in international development were the order of the day.
China knew that it needed new friends – people who wanted China to succeed and were willing to join forces with Beijing in the new Long March to build a new society. It was not looking for friends among those who had foisted opium on the Chinese people and contributed significantly to China’s Century of Humiliation. In time, those who had played a leading role in the subjugation of China – the British in particular – would establish links with the new China but as business and trade associates only, not as friends.
China’s numbers were significant. In 1949 the population had reached 600 million people. But the new leadership knew that its arrival on the world scene was not welcomed by the United States and Western Europe. Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946 had recast international affairs. The Nazis were defeated and the World War II coalition – the U.S. the UK and the USSR – was history. The East-West conflict had become the new normal.
The tensions burst asunder with the Korean War which pitted the U.S. against China. Hostilities were undertaken with great commitment on both sides. Lives were lost in considerable numbers – not on the scale of World War II – but still very serious.
It is in this world context that China took its first steps to build links with foreign trade and business friends. They acted with care – fully aware that many countries wanted China to fail. Much was at stake and much responsibility rested on China’s shoulders to make the correct decisions. Stumble and fail – and the Communist experiment would be condemned to the past leaving the USSR quite isolated. Succeed and prosper and the Communist experiment would be applauded by the Third World as a model of development for countries eager to throw off the burden of U.S./European control.
- DR JI CHAODING
EARLY LIFE
On the Chinese side the principal responsibility lay with the Premier and Foreign Secretary, Zhou Enlai, who presided over China’s new relations with the outside world. Close to him was Dr Ji Chaoding, upon whose shoulders rested the main responsibility for establishing new links with key individuals who would play a leading role in the establishment of China’s economic relations with foreign countries. So who was Dr Ji?
The Ji family was prominent in education and politics in the Northern Province of Shanxi. Ji’s father, Ji Gongquan (1882–1967) studied law in Japan, but when the Republican Revolution of 1911 broke out and his government scholarship was suspended, he returned to China rather than accept Japanese government support.
Ji Gongquan and his family, early 20th century. Ji Chaoding (Dr Ji) is standing between his parents.
Ji Senior, became friends with the famous Chinese writer, Lu Xun, with whom he shared many progressive views. Ji Gongquan told his eldest son, Ji Chaoding (Dr Ji), that “if I were to join the ‘Preserve the Empire Party’ I might lose face. If I were to join the Revolutionary Party I might lose my head. I decided I was wisest to keep both.” Ji Senior became education commissioner in the 1920s for the new Shanxi provincial government but when he was ordered to open fire on student demonstrators, he resigned and moved his family from the capital back to Fenyang.
Ji Chaoding had two younger brothers, Ji Chaoli, and Ji Chaozhu (born 1929), who became a highly placed translator for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after 1949 and later China’s Ambassador to the UK. There was also a younger sister, Ji Qing (冀青).
- DR JI’S EDUCATION AND CAREER
Ji Chaoding was educated at Tsinghua University in China. During his youth he travelled widely – to the USSR, the USA and to Europe. In 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, Dr Ji met the economic historian Karl Wittfogel, then a member of the German Communist Party. Dr Ji was deeply influenced by Wittfogel’s Marxist analysis, which used geography and economics to analyze the development of China’s political system. Wittfogel argued that imperial despotism arose from control of waterways, which gave the ruling dynasty the ability to extract grain and gather tax revenue.
In the U.S. Dr Ji made career strides as an economist and became a Professor of Economics at Chicago University and at Columbia University. in 1936 he authored an important book – Key Economic Areas in Chinese History. This came to the attention of the internationally renowned academic China expert, the British born Professor Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China. Needham called Dr Ji a “learned and brilliant writer”. Needham went further and described Dr Ji’s Key Economic Areas” as “perhaps the most outstanding book on the development of Chinese history among Western books.”
China Today
Key Economic Areas in Chinese History – Dr Ji’s doctoral dissertation at Columbia University – was published in London by the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1936 (it was not published in the United States until many years later). This was Ji’s only book and it contained only 136 pages, but it had wide influence. A review of the 1964 reprint noted that “three decades after its completion and initial publication, this study still offers data and insights on the economic history of China not readily available elsewhere.” The book identified key areas of grain production which, when controlled by a strong political power, permitted that power to dominate the rest of the country and enforce periods of stability.
Richard Louis Edmonds wrote in 2002 that Ji offered this theory as an “overlay” to the largely political, historical-oriented dynastic-cycle theory developed by traditional Chinese historians. Dr Ji saw the lower Yellow River as the key economic area of the first period of unity and peace in the Qin and Han dynasties, but in the second such period, the Sui dynasty and the Tang dynasty, the key area shifted to the lower Yangzi basin, though linked to the Yellow River basin by the Grand Canal. During the third period, that is, the Yuan Ming and Qing dynasties (approximately the 13th–19th centuries), the lower Yangzi remained the key economic area.
When Dr Ji used geographical distribution of water control to explain the territorial form of China’s political and economic development, Wittfogel continued, “the motives behind the economic political activities of China’s dynasties thus appear much less humanitarian, but infinitely more realistic.”
Yet Dr Ji was one of the few Chinese intellectuals to be inspired by Wittfogel’s reading of Marx. Most Marxist intellectuals in China were uncomfortable with Marx’s concept of an Asiatic Mode of Production, viewing it as too negative because it denied China’s ability to develop independently. Dr Ji and Wittfogel differed from Stalin and the Comintern, who insisted that all human history developed in the same stages whether in Europe or Asia, and further insisted that the Asiatic mode of production did not fit into this unilinear pattern.
- DR JI IN THE U.S.
In 1927 Dr Ji met and married a Jewish American, Harriet Jaffe. They had two sons. Whilst in the U.S. he pursued his career as an economist and also wrote in support of China with the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). He founded a new journal, Ameriasia, and served on its editorial board with Chen Hansheng, another underground communist. Ji wrote a regular column, “Far Eastern Economic Notes,” which used materials supplied from Party sources in China. In 1937 the IPR appointed Dr Ji to its research staff, and in 1938 he travelled to China financed by a $90,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to gather material for a study of China’s wartime economic situation.
Dr Ji was becoming an economist of note which, significantly in the context of China’s Foreign Trade opening to the world, led him to develop close links with the economists (Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn) at Cambridge University in the UK who had worked closely with John Maynard Keynes in the writing of his famous treatise – The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. These connections played a significant role when Dr Ji was pursuing an interest in Jack Perry as will become apparent.
Back to China – when Japanese troops were about to take Fengyang, Dr Ji’s father, Ji Gongquan, had assumed that the occupation authorities knew of his Japanese education. To avoid being coerced into joining the government, Ji Gongquan and his family fled to Hankow, which became the temporary national capital after the fall of Nanjing. Dr Ji had planned to go to the wartime communist capital in Yan’an, but Zhou Enlai asked him instead to accompany his family to the United States, where he could present sympathetic information about China without revealing his political allegiance. This allowed Dr Ji to continue his work with the IPR and the magazine Amerasia.
- DR JI’S UNDERGROUND ACTIVITIES
Ji Chaoding returned to China in March 1940 and became involved, again on instructions from Zhou Enlai, with the Nationalist government’s financial mission to the U.S. He had been recruited in New York for this role in 1939 by the Shanghai banker K.P. Chen who headed the Universal Trading Corporation, a quasi-government mechanism for loans from the U.S. Treasury Department to the Chongqing government. Dr Ji and, fellow Communist, Chen Han-sheng travelled back to China through Burma, before Ji returned to New York following his appointment in December 1940 as Secretary -General of the Sino-American British Currency Stabilization Board, which took over from the Universal Trading Corporation. Again, his boss was K.P. Chen.
Interesting in relation to Ji’s later activities in China after 1949, following his appointment to the Stabilisation Board in December 1940 he met Solomon Adler, an English national who later in the 1960’s – having settled in China – occupied a senior position in Chinese political circles finalising the English translation of the writings of Mao Tsetung – reflecting the confidence placed in him by the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.
- DR JI AND THE KUOMINTANG (KMT)
Dr Ji accepted a position in the wartime government in Chongqing, where he lived in the same rooming-house as Adler. One senior Nationalist Party official, Chen Lifu, later complained that the intelligence agencies knew of Dr Ji’s communist connections but that the KMT Finance Minister, – the famous H.H. Kung – trusted Ji because they were from the same province and Kung had always held Dr Ji’s father, Ji Gongquan, in high respect.
The next KMT Finance Minister, T.V. Soong, was American trained and could not speak Chinese well. Soong and Dr Ji became close friends and brought Dr Ji within the political radius of the three influential Soong sisters -the most prominent women in modern Chinese history. – Soong Ai-ling, the eldest who married H.H. Kung; Soong Ching-ling, the middle who married Sun Yat-sen and Soong Mei-ling, the youngest who married Chiang Kai-shek, Dr Ji, a committed Marxist and unyielding opponent of the KMT notwithstanding, won the confidence of such leading members of the KMT as H.H. Kung and T.V. Soong – who remained blissfully unaware that Ji, their closest financial adviser, was all along an undisclosed member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and reporting directly to Zhou Enlai.
Ji Chaozhu, Ji’s brother who in the 1980’s became China’s Ambassador in London, recalled that H.H. Kung had once demanded “Chaoding, tell the truth. Are you a Communist?” Knowing that a Communist might be tortured or executed, Chaoding replied, “Uncle, I have followed you these many years… Do I look like a Communist to you?”
- DR JI AND BRETTON WOODS
Dr Ji was one of the most effective members of the Chinese delegation at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference where he served as H.H. Kung’s secretary. It was at the Conference that Dr Ji developed close links with John Maynard Keynes and, in particular, his close associate – Joan Robinson – later to be Professor of Economics at Cambridge University. Joan Robinson was to play an important role in initiating the Dr Ji/Jack Perry relationship in 1950.
When the war ended, Ji’s wife and their two children came to China for the first time. The couple divorced, however, since Ji planned to stay in China, whereas Harriet wanted to return to the U.S. He travelled to Australia in 1948 as an adviser to the KMT delegation at the United Nations Economic Council, and on his return to China was made economic adviser to Nationalist General Fu Zuoyi. a fellow Shanxi native.
Dr Ji and his father were among the intellectuals who persuaded Fu to peacefully surrender the city to the communist armies. Ji met with Fu at their Beijing home as part of the ultimately successful effort – again unaware throughout the surrender negotiations that Ji was all along an underground Communist Party member reporting directly to Zhou Enlai.
- DR JI’S ROLE IN THE NEW CHINA
On the eve of the creation of the new People’s Republic of China, Dr Ji became director of the research department of the People’s Bank of China. He then travelled with Mao’s revolutionary armies to Shanghai, where he became assistant general manager of the Bank of China. When the new government was declared in October, although his relationship with the Communist Party was not publicly known, he was put in charge of foreign capital enterprises under the Government Administration Council. In the 1950s, he represented China on trade and commercial missions. Domestically, he was a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPCCC)
The new government debated economic policy, especially foreign trade. Dr Ji favored trade with Western Europe and foreign investment, one of the first in the government to do so, because he believed that China needed Western technology in order to develop. But he also insisted that this foreign trade should be balanced, adding that Beijing would have to conduct marketing efforts to promote Chinese goods abroad. Some criticized him for this openness to the West and for his American education and contacts, saying that he “drank too much American water.” His brother, Chaoli, later commented that it was just as well that Chaoding was divorced from his wife, Harriet, for their marriage would have prevented him from playing a major role in the Communist Party. Dr Ji then married Luo Jingyi, another Chinese student activist who had joined the Communist Party in the United States in the 1920s.
Dr Ji went on to become one of the leaders of China’s delegation to the December 1957 Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, along with Liu Liangmo, Liu Ningyi, and Guo Moruo.
He died suddenly in 1963 of a cerebral hemorrhage. Joseph Needham organized a memorial service in Cambridge, England, and asked Owen Lattimore, Prof Joan Robinson, Jack Perry and other prominent China linked personalities to speak. Lattimore wrote that Ji was “humane to the marrow of his bones.”
In Beijing, Dr Ji was given a state service attended by Fu Zuoyi and high officials at which Zhou Enlai gave an encomium. Only after his death was Dr Ji’s long-time membership in the Chinese Communist Party officially acknowledged.
CONCLUSION
Dr Ji’s story is a China story. Many, like him, from different walks of life who became loyal members of the Communist Party of China. Life was never smooth or straightforward. This was a China going through turbulent times. It was revolution and the struggle in so many locations attracted a wide cross-section of Chinese society. There were setbacks and defeats, as well as progress and successes. And eventual victory and the establishment of the PRC on 1 October 1949.
Now there was a new challenge – how to consolidate the fruits of victory and put China on the path to plenty and modernity. Dr Ji was given clear instructions by Premier Zhou Enlai. “We need new trade partners. People with a commitment to the New China without any history of involvement in the Opium Trade”
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IN THE NEXT CHINA POST I WILL FOCUS ON THE POST 1949- JOURNEY OF DR JI THAT LED TO JACK PERRY.
HOW DID DR JI COME TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE DRESS MANUFACTURER FROM THE EAST END OF LONDON?
WHO DID DR JI KNOW WHO WOULD INTRODUCE HIM TO THE BRITISH JEW WHO LOOKED ONLY TO SELL DRESSES INTO THE SOVIET UNION?
HOW DID JACK PERRY – A SECRET MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN – RESPOND TO A DEVELOPING RELATIONSHIP WITH A SECRET MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA?
WHAT DID THEY DISCUSS – POLITICS, BUSINESS, POPULAR CULTURE, FAMILIES?
DR JI HAD LIVED AND WORKED IN THE UNITED STATES AND HAD MIXED WITH MANY NON-CHINESE BUT JACK HAD NEVER ENCOUNTERED A CHINESE FROM CHINA OR FROM ANY BACKGROUND. HOW DID THEY GET ON? AWKWARD AND STILTED OR RELAXED AND PERSONABLE?
AND HOW DID JACK EXPLAIN THESE DEVELOPMENTS IN MOSCOW TO HIS WIFE, DORIS, IN LONDON?
AND REMEMBER THESE KEY EVENTS IN MOSCOW OCCURRED BETWEEN THE SEMI-FINAL AND FINAL OF THE APPROACHING 1952 UK WEMBLEY CUP FINAL IN WHICH JACK’S LIFELONG TEAM – ARSENAL – WAS INVOLVED.
GRAHAM PERRY
